Introduction

Is your infrastructure immutable? Are you sure?

Pulsar is designed to monitor for file system events, acting as a real-time
File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) agent. Pulsar is composed of a custom Salt
beacon that watches for these events and hooks into the returner system for
alerting and reporting.

In other words, you can recieve real-time alerts for unscheduled file system
modifications anywhere you want to recieve them.

We've designed Pulsar to be lightweight and not dependent on a Salt Master. It
simply watches for events and directly sends them to one of the Pulsar
returner destinations (see the Quasar_ repository for more on these).

Two different installation methods are outlined below. The first method is more
stable (and therefore recommended). This method uses Salt's package manager to
track versioned, packaged updates to Hubble's components.

The second method installs directly from git. It should be considered bleeding
edge and possibly unstable.

.. _pulsar_installation:

Installation

Each of the four HubbleStack components have been packaged for use with Salt's
Package Manager (SPM). Note that all SPM installation commands should be done
on the Salt Master.

Usage

Once Pulsar is fully running there isn't anything you need to do to interact
with it. It simply runs quietly in the background and sends you alerts.

.. _pulsar_configuration:

Configuration

The default Pulsar configuration (found in <pillar.example>)
is meant to act as a template. It works in tandem with the
<hubblestack_pulsar_config.yaml> file. Every environment will have
different needs and requirements, and we understand that, so we've designed
Pulsar to be flexible.